The Macallan’s New Whisky Celebrates Time, Space, and Sherry Casks

A Spanish industrial estate, where temperatures breach 105°F (41°C) even in September, is an odd place for The Macallan to launch its new Scotch whisky.

But what happens behind the walls of the cooperages of Vasyma and Tevasa in Jerez, and just down the road at Bodega Valdespino, is as consequential to The Macallan’s final product as anything that happens in Scotland.

Most of whisky’s romance is attached to distilleries and dunnage warehouses. Still, it is here, in the baking heat of Andalusia, that sherry casks – the lifeblood of the industry – are made and seasoned. The Macallan is particularly proud of its vast Speyside estate, yet its latest release, Time : Space Sherry Cask, celebrates the sherry industry’s inextricable role in its production.

The Macallan pins itself to sherry-seasoned oak casks, whose price is dictated by demand. Following a post-pandemic boom in whisky production, prices for those casks rose sharply. Rather than play that game, The Macallan secured its supply between 2023 and 2024 by purchasing half of Grupo Estévez, Valdespino’s owner; the Vasyma cooperage outright; half of Tevasa Forestal Group; and sawmills in both Europe and the US.

Time : Space Sherry Cask marks that moment. It’s made with the first whisky to be married in Valdespino sherry-seasoned casks since that 2023 agreement, drawn from the first 200 casks filled during the bicentenary in 2024. Lots of dates, lots of alignments, but what does it do to the whisky? Before its spending spree, The Macallan already had long-standing partnerships with the cooperages and Valdespino.

I ask lead whisky maker, Euan Kennedy, if the deal will ultimately change the Macallan drinking experience: “I think the reality is no,” he says. “Our records show that the first time we have records of Valdespino casks being used is in 1973.

“At that time we were not planning to acquire the company or anything like that. And it was not treated separately. It was just part of the inventory. This release is the first deliberate effort to use only Valdespino casks.”

Factor in that Time : Space Sherry Cask is a 20-year age statement. The whisky spent most of its life in other sherry-seasoned oak before the marrying period began, and the Valdespino influence is a layer, not a foundation. To an extent, that is the point. The investments were never only about price; they were also about quality and consistency, cask after cask, for decades to come.

At the Vasyma cooperage, which I toured during the morning shift, air-dried oak staves become finished casks in little over an hour. It’s loud, hot, and dusty, and the coopers move 300lb butts around the factory floor as if they weigh nothing. The Macallan’s own quality checks run throughout, from the grain of the staves to the depth of the toast, before a cask is judged fit to be filled.

What it’s filled with is the biggest point of difference. The Macallan has a bespoke sherry formula that it has developed with Valdespino that no other distillery can use. The sherry sits outside designated varieties, though I’m told it has similarities to oloroso. Something in the formula means it cannot be called oloroso, which is why The Macallan label always reads “sherry-seasoned oak casks”.

That is a point of contention on the day, as whisky aged in ex-oloroso casks is considered a mark of quality. Why would The Macallan not go the extra step and make sure their casks can be called ex-oloroso?

“I think I would describe it the other way round,” Kennedy says. “We are taking an extra step by making a bespoke wine. It’s that idea of culmination of learnings. The relationship we’ve got, the learnings that we’ve taken, means we can make the best possible wine to season our casks with.

“You’re not limited by a style of sherry. You’re taking the best of the knowledge you’ve built over the years in terms of what works best to prepare and make The Macallan casks, and ultimately what’s going to give us the best outcome from a quality perspective in The Macallan whisky itself.”

Pushed on this secret recipe, Kennedy says: “They are very much our learnings, and to an extent we’ll hold on to those learnings. It’s unique to us, and it’s important that we retain that knowledge for ourselves.”

If Time : Space Sherry Cask represents an already-established style of whisky, the job of differentiating it falls to positioning. At 20 years old, it bridges the gap between the 18 Year Old and 25 Year Old in its Sherry Oak range, with the price (£1,100 / $1,480) sitting closer to the latter.

“It sits in the middle,” Jaume Ferràs, global creative director, tells me. “It doesn’t compete with any. It’s not trying to compete against the 18. It’s not trying to pretend to be a 25.”

The conviction with which Ferràs speaks suggests that he is the driving force behind Time : Space, which will be a multi-bottle collection that started with the 2024 release, Mastery. Sherry Cask has the same bottle design – a circular vessel with a hole in the middle – which divided opinion upon release. Put plainly, the traditionally minded didn’t like it, yet the bottle largely sold out.

“I see us keeping doing this with no problem,” he says. “We’re very comfortable with this product. We wanted to bet, is it going to work or not, when we launched Time : Space Mastery, because the product design was so different and the story was different from what we normally do.

“You know these things, you’re cautious. But the demand was so big, and we had so many consumers wanting to have one bottle, that it gave us the confidence to actually go with the plans that we had to make a collection.”

But there is one big difference. Time : Space Sherry Cask is age-stated at 20 years; Mastery was a non-age-statement release. That falls in line with a trend where The Macallan has been reducing the number of non-age-statement bottles, providing customers with more assurances regarding age and strength. That was true for its recent James Bond edition, which carried an age statement and a vintage year, while a new 12 Year Old 110 Proof replaced the discontinued Classic Cut.

“I think [age statements] give you peace of mind,” Ferràs says. “There is transparency: I know what I’m getting.

“And are we reacting to this? Not really, because we still plan to make certain products with no age. But what is true is that it has to be very well selected, which ones should do this, and there has to be a reason why. Otherwise consumers think, why are you doing this with that?”

Those are decisions for today, but much of the work that made Time : Space Sherry Cask possible won’t have tangible effects for decades. The casks I saw rolling out of the cooperages won’t produce whisky worth bottling until the 2040s, and while Kennedy and Ferràs still have many years ahead of them, the fruits of this labor will be for their successors.

Time : Space Sherry Cask lets the generation that built the industry’s first vertically integrated supply chain taste the first fruits of it.

The Macallan Time : Space Sherry Cask (44.8% ABV) will be available at The Macallan Boutique at Harrods from September 17, 2026, then more widely via themacallan.com